The Horrible Bosses of Hollywood

It sounds so glamorous, working in Hollywood. Doesn't it? Sure, if you're a studio chief or an actor with your own trailer. But if you're a powerless minion, it's a special kind of hell. Long before he was the boss of this magazine, Jim Nelson endured the worst humiliation that town can offer: life as a Hollywood assistant

The dog snarls at me from his coffin. In life, Digger was the most golden of retrievers, but now he lies sideways, stiff and sculpted, a feeble paw pointing the way to some last, unfetchable bone. His coat, once alarmingly orange, has gone rusty and wet, like the juicy copper of expired batteries. He looks exhausted, as if he had taken the walk of his life. He looks—there is no running from it—like roadkill. And that mouth! His Final Groomers have wrapped the black rubber of his lips tightly around his incisors so that, defanged by death, he might growl into eternity.

I have heard that pet cemeteries exist, have even read books in which they figure, but until I drove up to the Valley for this service, I have never imagined hanging out with an embalmed canine. Here in the Mourning Room—a sad shuffle away from the office, where caskets, tiny and cute and tragic, are sold—Digger's box sits below a celestial track light. Around him there is satin and frills and the sagging comfort of pink insulation. But nothing can soften the truth: He is going into that hole outside, and we are all here to witness it.

The turnout is small—my boss, a group of his shrinking circle of friends, and me. I am here as a delicate function of my job, which is blurry and difficult to define. I work in Hollywood as a writer's assistant. My two bosses, M— and L—, are TV writers; Digger was M—'s dog, and, in a sense, one of my masters. I knew when I was hired that the position required a good deal of secretarial work: answering phones, setting up meetings, formatting scripts. What I did not understand is that the job of writer's assistant is whatever the writers deem it to be. Writers, you know, are a terrifically creative bunch; they like to sit around all day thinking of new ways to employ their assistants. This often involves dogs, or any other pets the writers might have.

Take Digger, whom I have come to know through a series of rigorous walks. Indeed I have, upon instruction and in the middle of a busy workday, driven 4.8 miles to my boss's Hollywood Hills home to unlock the door, fetch the leash, and let Digger take his airs. I have padded around the dog parks of Los Angeles, pulled him away from strange curs, fed him biscuits and livery treats. Yes, Digger and I have had our memories. But strangely, I find, I am not torn at his passing.

And yet I grieve, publicly, for the sake of my job. M— has requested my presence in a manner I take as a command. In the first flush of grief, he asked me to show my loyalty—“You'll be there for Digger, right?”—using that sort of modern benevolent boss voice that pretends, for a moment, that there are no longer lines of authority and that, at the end of the day, I want to come to his dog's weird memorial service.

You would not call M— a “people person.” He is acerbic, career-drunk, moving toward midlife friendlessness. Digger was his only steadfast pal. “Dogs don't fuck you over,” he once bellowed at me in a conversation I surely should have been paid $250 an hour for. When he asked if I was coming to the funeral, I took it as: “Mourn with me—or else.”

Hollywood bosses prize loyalty, which is why so many have dogs.

And so we are gathered together to mark the end of a frisky life. There is no priest, no eulogy. In their place: awkwardness. We move through the room aimlessly, uncertain where our mourning should take us. (I have never felt so keenly the need for a funeral director.) The man who sold M— the plot finally stumbles in from the office next door and tells us what to do: We should all file up to the casket, say our good-byes, and exit outside, so that M— can have the room to grieve alone. Sounds like a plan!

When it's my turn, I'm a little skeeved out. Not only does Digger look more aggressive than usual, he appears to be sweating in the halogen heat—there is a cosmetic dampness about him, as if he'd been moussed to death by stylists. I walk up to the coffin and stare down—a little sad for Digger, suddenly. Poor dog. You should have been cremated or buried in the woods, far from the tender, neurotic mercies of TV writers. What the hell are you doing here?

The question hangs in the air, comes back at me, as if dear old Digger were telling me, “Ask yourself, loser.”

For some reason, I make the sign of the cross, then shuffle out into the warm L.A. sun, looking for answers.

···

Columbia Pictures TV Studios, corner of Sunset and Gower, 1989. Every morning I report to the grim desk slammed into the corner of the reception room. My bosses, the comedy writers, have their own office, a stately pleasure dome, across the hall. We are connected by an elaborate phone system, with a direct buzz line from their desks to mine—a little something I call the Comedy Alarm. It buzzes often, bringing a panic of perspiration to my temples.

I share my office space with a group of writer's assistants, all of whom are connected to their superiors by the same buzzing system, all of whom fear their bosses, resent their bosses' success, and yet crave their bosses' sweet-ass jobs. When any assistant's buzzer sounds, everything stops, the buzzee groans, and a feeling of fellow-dread fills the room.

The reception area serves as a hangout for various Columbia secretaries, messengers, and mailroom guys and as a kind of chamber for our constant grievances. The most bitter among us is Kent, who at night performs as the drag queen Jackie Beat, a beat poetess with a vicious tongue. In truth, the line between Kent, the disgruntled office worker, and Jackie Beat, the disgruntled drag queen, is fading daily. Once, early on, feeling momentarily comfortable around the group, I'd mentioned that I'd just moved here and told some brief anecdote about growing up in the D.C. suburbs. When I finished, Kent glowered at me. “What makes you think any of us could possibly give a shit about that little story of yours?”

“It's just a story,” I stammered.

“I think you need to think long and hard about what's a story—and what isn't,” he snipped.

I shut up for two months.

The only thing that keeps the office from sliding into abject misery is the presence of Heidi, an impossibly sweet-natured receptionist who coos at all photos of babies and ponies and who instantly shushes away any negativity by pouting: “Noooooo! Don't even say that!” You can bitch about anything to Heidi—“I hate my life”; “I think I have scabies”—and the response is always the same, a tender mouse squeal: “ Noooooo! Don't even say that!”

The assistants around me are all wildly talented people who know they need to suppress any sign of creativity, lest it threaten their bosses or get in the way of answering phone calls. (Years later, Heidi will co-write the music for a Tony-winning Broadway show, Passing Strange. Here at Columbia, she is barely allowed bathroom breaks.)

Across the hall, through the glass door of the reception room, I can see my bosses laughing hysterically in their office. They sit facing each other at two massive wooden desks, howling and hooting and idle to all the world, like senators-elect without a mandate. Their desktops are covered with toys—wind-up fruit, plastic swami snakes, a clattering set of dentures. They sit with their feet up, shoes off, reading Variety or leisurely gazing out the window at Gower Street, occasionally winding a toy. And they laugh. They crack each other up. This is what they are each paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to do. This is called comedy development.